Color Theory

Color Theory

Unless you’re part of the art/design world, chances are pretty decent that you’ve never heard of PANTONE®. The world-renowned “authority on color,” PANTONE created an innovative system in the mid-1960s for identifying, matching and communicating colors among the graphic arts community. To this day, they continue to inspire those in the design world through color-related products (like the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM®, a book of standardized colors in fan format), services and technology.

One of the more high-profile uses of the PANTONE name comes during seasonal Fashion Weeks around the world. In February, New York Fashion Week showed the Fall 2010 collections and a preference for the 10 colors mentioned above, including Lagoon, which is this season’s interpretation of turquoise, PANTONE’s color of the year for 2010. (Last year was mimosa, a bright marigold-y yellow suspiciously similar to Golden Glow.)

While this is all fine and fascinating for a select sliver of art- and design-minded society, I can’t help but to think of a more real-world application. More specifically, the scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep rips Anne Hathaway a new one for her blissful ignorance of the power of the fashion elite. In much the same way that the fictional fashion editor takes credit for dictating her assistant’s innocent choice of a blue (“cerulean”) sweater, the string-pullers at PANTONE have dictated our fashion choices for the next year. Come September, we’ll all be decked out in Purple Orchid shirts and Oyster Gray pants. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…